ATI makes DirectX 9 breakthrough for $89

Zardon

ATI IS STILL LOOKING BAD in the DirectX 9 market below $100, because Nvidia X has almost 80 per cent of the pie. ATI always knew that it had to do something about it, and now it has.
TUL, company that we use to know as Power Color sent us some pricing on these cards, and you will be able to buy a Radeon 9550 with 256MB for $129, a Radeon 9550 with 128MB for $109, while the slowest Radeon 9550SE card will cost only $89.

inquirer

Dom

Very cool.

The_Neon_Cowboy

Btw nvidia's sub $100 market sucks and for the longest time.... I mean come on a 5200? that as i have herd that runs mostly as a 2 pixel pipe soultion exect for a few cases... just becouse thier cards say theyhave dx9 support i've hard it not even true support....

so there goes any hope nvidia had in that market now that they have a true dx9 soultion with ps 2.0 support....

Matth

Great, we sure need a low-end shake-up...

Nvidia seem set to replace the 5200 with the equally lacklustre 5600XT that perfoms no better, possibly worse.

Of course, it all depends how ATI's interpretation of a low-end DX9 card performs - if it's half decent, then it's instant obsolescence for their 9200 DX8 models.

Mind you, if the 9550 is a low end already, and then ATI do a SE version, that could end up as another "too slow to be useful" DX9 card like the FX5200.

Vampyromaniac

well, what do you expect for under $100?

swimtech

Actually, 800x600 - 32bit color, details set to high, some AF capability, running at 40fps in the new games would do a lot of folks very well, don't you think?

Vampyromaniac

new games, such as what? I wouldn't expect FarCry or Halo to run that well, with high detail

MIG-31

hope he's not thinking about games such as far cry, as i'm pushed on a fx5900 256mb in the highest possible @ 1024x768rez (in game) gorgeous graphics, would probably burn out a low end card.

The_Neon_Cowboy

you'd be suprised how well game like ut2004 plays on a orgional radeon 64 mb vivo (7200)

1024x768 no aa no af

swimtech

That is what I meant, and "new" meaning, yes, Far Cry, HL2 (no aa, maybe some af - sure...), UT2004. 4 pipes, 128bit memory bus, good GPU clock, it should handle it...

Vampyromaniac

no I wouldn't
notice I didn't say ut2004, which is more cpu dependent than FarCry or Halo

But yeah, swimtech's 40 fps sounds about right for a low-end card, under those conditions

swimtech

Would be interesting to find out for what I figure is the majority of computer owners - you know - the center of the bell curve... And you all can see that I'm behind that...

Anyway, just conjecture here guys, but OK - this site has over 60,000 members - figure half of those visit semi-regularly. Most of those I would suppose bought their computer within the last year or year and a half. That would give them a P4 processor (2-2.6Ghz), 256-512Mb DDR ram, and a 7200 RPM hard drive - fairly snappy machines...

A 9500 Pro card or better gives all these folks the capability to run the new games out now (not HL2 or Doom3 though) at 1024x768 with most of the eye candy enabled. Remember, most folks have a 17 or 19 inch monitor that really won't run well at better that 1280x1024 (and 75hz refresh or so) without looking mushy - video bandwidth limited...

An inexpensive machine purchased today includes a 2.8G processor, 512M ram, and a 7200 rpm drive with an inexpensive 19" monitor for less than a grand. The key to assisting this system for gameplay would be to equip it with hardware based sound, and give it a four pipe 9550. It should theoretically run the new stuff well at low resolution (1024x768 or less), with much better performance during gameplay than any competing video solution. Drop the rez down and it should even do the Doom3/HL2 thing with aa off - and ATI's hardware doesn't take a big hit using 32bit color and some AF - and look (and feel - control wise) good doing it.

I'm just excited some by the possibility that a really inexpensive computer should - by my estimation - be able to play the good stuff. The only way to know for sure though would be to test...

The_Neon_Cowboy

halo is playable on it .. far cry demo is to

not eveyone needs 100pfs to play a game that only needs 30-60 fps to play like butter



EDIT:

keep in mind when you watch your tv its playing at about 25 fps

Vampyromaniac

keep in mind that has little to do with PC games and it's ~60 fields per second (~30fps)